Saturday, 25 June 2011

more recent stuff

1. Quarry Coombes Edge - ink & pastel A4

2. Quarry Coombes Edge - pen & ink wash

3. Lantern Pike - ink

4. Ridge up to Mt Famine - oil paint & collage A2

Recent sketchbook work from early this year and from around April/May. Coombes Edge is very exposed to the wind from the Irish Sea being the first high ridge to the East above the Mcr conurbation, so I wear a very attractive balaclava to keep the hair out of the way. It's extremely dramatic, with great blocks of stone sometimes looking almost like the Monument Valley formations (my favourite scenery in any Western). In the evening sunlight it's at it's best, when the shadows are stark.

And a paint/collage piece I started last Autumn, the foreground of which I am now re-working. This undulating ridge opposite the Kinder plateau was one of the things that inspired me to use landscape as my subject. I first saw it in the Autumn of 2008 when it was all a velvety rust red & with the broken drystone walls following its curves against the sky, looking like the spine of an African ruminant (a grass/ vegetation eating mammal, Martin) of some kind- a strange landscape- very sculptural.